Page 3 of Hollywood King
The man could eat. He often took down entire pizzas by himself, and I only marveled with my own slices barely eaten. Something about him made me smile. I couldn’t look at him and not get a flutter in my belly and a tingle in my toes.
“Eat and stop staring,” he warned after a few seconds.
I dug a spoon into the stew and took a tentative taste. It cooled slightly, and I got a few good bites before stopping. My stomach rolled around uncomfortably. I’d forgotten to eat before now, and my body reminded me I needed to do better.
“Come here,” Heath said and wrapped his hand around my hip. He slid me down the countertop to sit in front of him.
He held up a spoonful of stew to my lips, and I shook my head. “I’m not a baby. I don’t need you to feed me.”
“If you let yourself get so wrapped up in things you forget to eat, maybe I do.”
Everything I’d been bottling up about our soon to be separation surged up, and I threw it at him. “Unlikely, as we are about to be hundreds of miles apart.”
He continued holding the spoon near my lips. “It’s a six-hour drive or a one-hour plane ride. I doubt we’ll have trouble seeing each other when we want. Now stop acting like a baby and take a bite.”
I glared but leaned forward and let him gently slide the steel between my lips. He watched my face, his eyes scanning back and forth from my lips to my eyes to my neck and up again. Suddenly, everything shifted. The dynamic changed, and I noticed for the first time how my knees caged his hips. And the soft subtle scent of him so close to me. He licked his own lips, but held another bite of food up to mine.
This time, I locked eyes with him as I leaned in and took what he offered. It wasn’t him providing sustenance, but him asking for so much more. The one line we’d yet to cross. I continued meeting his gaze while I chewed and until I could speak again.
“I’m not hungry anymore.”
He held up the spoon again. “One more. For me.”
When his voice dropped to that husky whisper, I couldn’t deny him anything. I again let him slide the spoon between my lips all the while watching his Adam’s apple bob in his throat and the tick in his jaw as he ground his back teeth together.
When I’d finished chewing, he dropped the dishes on the counter with a clatter and seized my face in his hands. He smelled like the stew, and the deep, evergreen scent I’d come to associate with him. Part soap and part just him.
This time, he really kissed me. The kiss he should have given me the second he climbed off his bike in the driveway.
His mouth took mine, and I lost myself to his lips.
He kissed me like a man had never kissed a girl before.
He kissed me like the first time—so full of promise and surprise and shame.
He kissed me like he’d gladly spend the rest of his life there against my mouth.
And when my legs began to shake around the hard jut of his hip bones, he released me. Floating on the new void I’d yet to work around.
Breathe, Cathy.
It took a few seconds to get our bearings, and I tried to ignore the press of his erection against his jeans. Tried and failed and tried again. “Keep kissing me like that, and I’m not going to college. I’ll follow you to Hollywood and keep you busy every second.”
He still wore that face he picked up when we crossed from gentle and sweet to something with an edge. As if by frowning so severely, he might beat back his demons and save me from himself.
“Come here.” I reached out to him now, and he shifted back into my arms. “You aren’t going to hurt me.”
“Cathy, you’ve always been sick. The last couple of years, you’ve been better, enough to go off to school even, but I’m afraid if we go too far—if I go too far—I’ll set you back. I couldn’t live with myself if I hurt you.”
I shifted forward on the countertop so I could wrap my legs around his hips this time. “And you think by sleeping with me, you’ll somehow put me in the hospital? It’s sex, Heath, not skydiving. I’m the only twenty-year-old virgin I know. I’ve been waiting because you asked me to. But I want you, and I don’t know how much longer I can keep my good little girl hands to myself.”
I pressed my hips forward to make my point. He braced his hands on the counter next to my legs and dropped his head between us.
“I know you want me,” I whispered. “So take me. Do all the dirty things you’ve been imagining for the last few years. I like it dirty. I want it dirty.”
He lifted his chin now, his jaw set. “Not for your first time. It’s supposed to be gentle and with someone you love.”
Love. Fuck Love. We’d loved each other with a singular madness for years, and neither of us felt the urge to confess it. Love between us was a known quantity. A fact.
